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René Daval (Université de Reims, Champagne-Ardenne) Ethics and Economics, pragmatism and theory of justice. The economic crisis is not only strictly economic, but ethic too. The question of social justice is implied in the events. The great book of John Rawls A Theory of Justice had tried at the end of the twentieth century to build a theory of justice a priori, which owed at the philosophies of Rousseau and Kant. One of the great merit of the book is to link ethics and economics:the two principles of justice are not only economic principles but ethic principles. The question of liberty and of equality is an ethical question. The philosophy of Rawls , just like the philosophy of Kant, asserts that it is not possible to identify propositions which use the verb “is” and that who use the verb “ought”. Rawls thinks about ideal conditions of justice and of equity. The great pragmatist philosopher Hilary Putnam thinks that it is necessary to claim “the end of a dogma”. We cannot separate the propositions which describe facts and these which asserts values , in spite of the recommendations of David Hume, Emmanuel Kant or Johann Fichte.Putnam has studied the consequences of the opposition between facts and values in economic sciences like in other sciences. Putnam has made this choice because the question of knowing if values can or not be the object of a rational discussion has been treated in economics. This question is one of the most important for Amartya Sen that Putnam quotes here. I wish in my study develop an a posteriori theory of justice with the last book of Sen: The Idea of Justice (2009). Sen wants to eliminate the injustice. His book is not only a treatise of economics science, but a book of ethics. We can discuss with rationality about values. Sen agree with pragmatism and Putnam about this question. It is necessary to identify injustices which it is possible to put right. We need of a theory of justice. But the theory of justice that Sen wish to build is not an a priori one, just like that of Rawls. Sen wish to determinate how we must proceed to promote justice . It is not necessary to think what is in the ideal a society perfectly just, like Rawls wanted to do, but to study the life that people can live. Sen makes the methods that G.E.Moore thaught to be the best one in ethics: a translation into the concrete. Sen reefers to the European Enlightenment, to Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and to the French mathematicians and philosophers Condorcet and Borda. The theories of contract are important, but so the theories of philosophers who compare the ways of life of people who live in different countries which have different political powers and different economical organisations.It is necessary to study the concrete behaviour of people in social interactions. Sen does not quote the great book of G.H.Mead Mind, Self and Society, but his work is in the same direction. Sen quotes Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Marx and J.S.Mill. Amartya Sen does not assert that all society is a society where the struggle of social classes is the first propriety, but he thinks that Marx has studied social injusticies in nowdays and in history. I Think that Sen is right when he wants to describe concrete means to struggle against injustice. It was good to define justice a priori just like Rawls. It is now a necessity to study concrete political and economical decisions to make disappear injustice. An important thesis that I wish to defend with Sen is the following one: reasoning is crucial to understand justice, even in a word which is full of unreasonable decisions. Justice is not a question of sentiment, but of reason. One of the requirement of a theory of justice is to use reason. It is not the sentiment which condemn the war in Irak in 2003, but the reason. Sen does not wish to define a trancendantal justice, like Kant has done in The Doctrine of Law, but to know if an option is less injust than an other. Sen recommands a comparative method. It is not necessary to define first strictly just institutions.